


The Man We All Remember From the Newsreels

by Pookaseraph



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied Relationships, News Media, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-18
Updated: 2012-06-20
Packaged: 2017-11-08 01:38:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pookaseraph/pseuds/Pookaseraph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Still getting used to the twenty-first century, Steve comforts himself with memories of long-gone friends. But Howard Stark, the man Steve remembers, is nothing like the man he sees in the newsreels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Steve was still getting used to the feel of the Avengers Mansion, and of the twenty-first century as a whole, to be honest. The mansion had dozens of rooms, each of them seemed to have their own very specific purpose and he was still getting used to them. The most difficult thing to get a handle on, however, was the constant presence of Jarvis over his shoulder. Tony had explained it was actually 'J.A.R.V.I.S.' but Steve had difficulty with that as well. His latest find was a modern movie theater setup.

By 'modern' he meant something that wouldn't have been out of place from Brooklyn in the 1940s. It seemed out of place in the sleek actual-modernity of the Mansion. Steve sat down somewhere towards the middle.

"Would you like to watch a movie, sir?" Jarvis' cool, British voice echoed from somewhere up above him and Steve couldn't suppress the urge to look around, over his shoulder, and back towards the front, but as always there was no one else there.

"Alright." He waited.

"You will need to be more specific than 'alright'."

Oh. Steve stared at the screen for a long moment, he thought about just asking for something representative, or one of the movies he'd seen as a child, that might have made him feel a bit better. He knew he needed to catch up, and he wasn't doing a particularly good job of letting go of the past. The past was only a few months ago; months ago Hitler and Schmidt were the most dangerous men on the planet, now they were dust and ash.

"Do you have anything with Peggy Carter in it?" Obviously that wouldn't be a movie, Peggy was no Hollywood starlet, but, perhaps a war movie, or a biopic.

"Just a moment." Steve waited. "Peggy Carter [Historical Figure] appears in one feature: _Howard Stark: The Creation of a Legend_."

Steve almost laughed, but then realized that Howard was long dead and... he felt a bit ill. "Play that, then."

"All parts or only parts featuring Peggy Carter?"

Steve took a moment to think about Howard, about the man he'd met only about a year ago, the man who'd helped... create him, in all honesty. He knew both so much and so little about him, Howard's life, especially before the war, was not an open book to Steve, and he'd had another thirty-five years after the war, so there was so much about Howard that Steve just didn't know.

"Play the whole thing."

He settled in to the back of the seat, leaning, slightly.

_"Born in 1917, in the middle of the First World War, Howard Stark's legacy was always to be a man of war. The son of Howard Stark, Sr. and Amanda Stark..."_

A man of war... Steve watched the slowly unfolding story of Howard, learning the youthful story of his old friend. It was odd to imagine him growing up on Long Island, and in Queens, barely a stone's throw from Steve's old haunts in Brooklyn, but their two worlds couldn't have been more different. He wondered, sometimes, after the Serum, after he and Howard had become closer, what it might have been like to have known Howard before. Steve had always imagined his life was pretty dames and innovation, but it seemed... strange to see pictures of Howard, chest deep in machines, tools in hand, not smiling and flirting and... offering fondue.

His educational introspection was interrupted barely twenty minutes in.

"Pause it." Tony was standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame, arc reactor glowing enough in the dark that Tony's face was lit, but completely unreadable to Steve. The lights came up slowly without being asked, and Steve blinked. "Some people might consider it creepy to watch other people's dead dad's biopics in their house without them."

"Sorry," he answered, reflexively.

Tony shrugged. "At least you aren't watching the home videos." Tony invited himself in, sat down right next to Steve and kicked his feet up on the antique theater chairs. "J.A.R.V.I.S. have Dummy get me a dirty martini and... roll it."

Steve didn't really question Tony's presence, Howard was his father, after all, but he found his attention split now, between Tony, sitting near-stone faced next to him and the reels that told the developing story of Howard Stark and his mechanical brilliance. Tony's dirty martini arrived a few minutes later and they had moved seamlessly into the stirring tales of Howard's early Manhattan Project days. It was... incredible to believe that Howard had been working there, in Manhattan, on the project that would eventually bring the atomic bomb, all while working with Erskine and having enough time to kiss dames on stage at the Stark Expo. He would have wondered when Howard slept if he hadn't know for a fact that throughout the war Howard had survived mostly on coffee after a four hour catnap, usually inside whatever he was working on. 'Helps me think', he'd said, like somehow being surrounded by whirring metal made everything else fade into the background.

His son was some sort of science fiction cyborg now, so he supposed it was very much like father, like son. Steve was certain Howard would have put an arc reactor in his own chest if he thought it would have made him able to go farther, work harder, and push the boundaries of known science faster.

 _"In 1943, Stark personally flew in several manned missions behind enemy lines, to deliver goods and personnel and carry out missions essential for Allied success."_ A reel of Howard came up, he was... all frowns, all business, Peggy behind him looking like she was headed to a court martial. Steve smiled, and a moment later couldn't quite stifle a snort as he realized when the reel was taken.

"Pause." Tony was... _glowering_ at him. "What the hell? I thought you were _in_ the War."

Tony Stark, the man who seemed to never care what anyone thought, what anyone said, who laughed at the fact that he had some sort of naked... thing with some famous blonde woman or another seemed completely offended that Steve had snorted at his father's biopic. "I'm sorry, it's just... they're acting like the Army _wanted_ him doing those things." Steve shrugged. "Half the time he flew out there they were terrified he was going to get shot down and their lead engineer with the SSR was going to get blown up. The other half he'd been actively ordered not to go. The only reason they didn't kick him out was because he was rich and they needed Stark Industries."

Tony was looking at him like he'd grown two heads. "You're... talking like my father was some sort of... cowboy."

"Howard? Sure... I remember that flight, the first half, anyway. He spent half of it pestering Agent Carter to go have... _late night fondue_." God he remembered that, it had made him look like a right idiot. "And then he gives me this transponder... that didn't even work! Well... I got it blown up, but we walked thirty-five miles to get back to base camp. They thought they were going to a court martial!"

Steve looked at the frozen video, at Howard and Peggy, all frowns and serious. Peggy was always like that, but Howard... Howard looked almost unrecognizable. The War had been bloody, Steve remembered that like it was yesterday, and Howard had sometimes seemed to walk through it in this... good-humored fog that never touched him, never affected him. He strapped boys in armor, gave them guns, and smiled when they didn't come back. At first, Steve had thought him... well a bit of a sociopath. It didn't help that his first exposure to Howard had been that reversion car, and then being strapped in and bombarded with vita-rays, but... in the end he was a man who valued innovation and he knew Howard slept poorly on nights when he or the boys or even the regular soldiers were out in his armor with his weapons. Steve realized towards the end it was smiling to keep from crying.

Howard looked distraught there, though, it was hard to believe he'd been joking about fondue only an hour or two earlier.

"Fondue?!" Tony asked.

"It's just cheese and bread," Steve answered.

"I know what fondue is! But my dad didn't... fondue with people, women."

For a second Steve wondered if Tony was referring to all the rumors that knocked around with whatever unit Howard was assigned to; fairy. But no, Tony's face said just the mere idea of Howard cutting loose at all was what was anathema. "Well, not with _Agent Carter_ ," Steve admitted. "He did... fondue though."

"Are we being euphemistic or non-euphemistic here? Because sometimes you say 'dancing' and you mean sex."

Steve blushed. "Both."

"Oh my god. I make it nearly to forty, but I think my mind has finally snapped."

Steve wasn't certain if Tony was serious, he seemed almost serious. "I'm sure your father never had fondue with anyone but your mother."

That earned him a raised eyebrow. "That just wasn't the sort of man he was. Here. Run it!" 

The film started up again, only a few moments later Steve recognized where they were, Switzerland, Hydra base. He remembered it like it was yesterday. It was only a few months ago in his own mind, the base, the Tesseract, his fight with Schmidt, going down in the Arctic... 

_"Stark was witness to the fall of Hydra, Hitler's premiere science outfit and the Axis counterpart of the SSR."_ He watched Howard, ridiculous glasses over his eyes, prodding at one of the Tesseract-blue (rendered a dull yellowy-white in the black-and-white photography) container. Colonel Phillips came in, followed by a blurry-eyed Agent Carter. Phillips took Howard by the elbow, said something in his ear and... Steve was glad he couldn't see Howard's face full on, just the hardening of his jaw was enough that he knew what Phillips had told him.

There was no sound, not from the original war reel, but he saw Howard gesture for the on hand scientists to wrap it up, moving on...

_"With the conclusion of his involvement with the SSR, Stark returned to Manhattan to continue theoretical work on the atomic bomb and begin the first stages of his post-war project, an improvement of existing unmanned deep sea exploratory vehicles for sounding out German and Soviet submarines."_

"See," Tony said, and the film stopped without him ordering it. "Work, work, work, the job, no time for fondue."

"...Right..." Steve just didn't know who the man in these newsreels was. It wasn't _Howard_. Maybe it was 'Stark' or 'Howard Stark' but it wasn't Howard. Howard was smiles and fondue and flirting and... a good deal of dancing. "Is that what... history says he was like?"

"That's who he was."

He didn't start that way... that wasn't the man Steve remembered. "If you'd asked me... if you'd asked me how I remember Howard. I would have said he was a lot like you."

"Me?"

"Brash, confident, self-assured... worried about the men and women who were put in harm's way with only Stark Industries between them and..." Splat. "He wore it well."

Tony frowned. "That's not who he was."

"Not towards the end, clearly." Steve looked up at the screen again, at Howard frowning and looking serious. It didn't even matter where it was, where he was, Steve could see it had become a permanent look for him. "Something changed."

Steve wished he didn't have an inkling of what the change had been.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony was rapidly finding his pre-existing list of 'things that freaked him out' woefully inadequate. The new chart topper: talking about his dad with his childhood hero. The knowledge that Tony was a Captain America fanboy was a closely guarded secret, known only to Happy, Pepper, and J.A.R.V.I.S. Fury probably knew, too, but if he knew what was good for him he'd keep that one to himself. Tony's first meetings with the actual living, breathing version of his childhood hero could have gone better, but Tony was a master of that, too.

He and Steve continued to stare at the paused film on the wall. Fall of Hydra, beginning of the end of World War II. And Steve...

"How could I be like him?" That was the question of the hour, possibly Tony's _life_. "After I..." Tony pressed his hand to the arc reactor in his chest, rubbed it, felt the slight warmth of it. "After I had some time to think, I wondered if Howard ever had any doubts about what Stark Industries did. Stark Industries _is_ America, we're like the fourteenth biggest country by GDP. Congress gives us more money every year than... a lot of things that help the world a lot more. I thought about it a lot."

After Afghanistan, after he'd gotten out with a hole in his chest and shrapnel a few microns from tearing up his heart.

"It was easy with the Nazis." The way Steve said 'Nazis' made him smirk, with a sharp, short 'A' and a hard 'T'. "You socked Adolf Hitler in the jaw."

"That was more your area of expertise," Tony answered. He'd seen the archival footage, dad watched it sometimes and Tony always snuck in behind the screen, saw his dad watch the reels, stone faced and pensive. Tony still had one of the war bonds that had Steve's face on it; the Treasury had released replicas just after the war, but Tony - well Howard and then Tony - had an original. "You really think I'm like him?" Tony was apparently indulging his masochistic tendencies today.

"When I first met your father..." Steve seemed to take a moment, choosing his words carefully. "He had a dame on each arm and was showboating about his hovering reversion car."

Tony felt a manic laugh burble up in his chest.

"When I saw he was the guy who was going to be working the levers and switches on my treatment, I didn't quite know if I should trust him. And then I was a hero and he was gone." Steve went back to looking at the screen, at Howard's face in the Hydra base, frozen and serious. "When we were... together in Italy, I saw the other side of that. He didn't sleep, barely ate, ran on coffee and stimulants, and if you caught a look at him when he thought no one was watching..." Steve trailed off, ran a hand down his jaw, maybe to cover his mouth, maybe something else. Tony didn't know Steve well enough to read it. "I should have seen it."

"Seen what?" Tony _loved_ to hear himself talk, but all he wanted right now was for Steve to finish his damn sentence, finish a damn thought, and Tony had to fight down the urge to shake it out of him.

"That you'd be the guy with a fancy solution, but you'd take the hit if no one else could. That was the Howard I knew." Steve didn't seem to have anything else to say, and Tony was at a loss. There was some film from the Stark Expo, the one Steve mentioned, 1942, but Tony had always figured that was just an act, PR. Tony had always known it was fake when he was a kid. Maybe he projected the 70s back on the 40s, but he still couldn't imagine his dad ever being that legitimately carefree. His whole _personality_ , his whole _persona_ , had always been a warped mirror of that vapid PR-Howard he knew from those old newsreels.

Dad hadn't looked, regardless - whether Tony was showing off, running circles around Bill Gates, or just acing the hell out of MIT. "You wanna... finish the show?" Tony pointed to the movie screen.

"I thought that was creepy." Tony thought he heard a reserve or reluctance in Steve's voice, like he didn't really want to see. He still couldn't wrap his head around it. Even when Tony talked with Fury about Howard, Fury had never given any indication that Howard was much different than Tony's recollection of him. Howard had been in S.H.I.E.L.D., something Tony had independently verified after the fact, and he'd worked his ass off there. Steve knew _Howard_ , not the bullshit PR guy, not the timely anecdote to get his head back in the game. Captain America knew his father, and they were sitting right next to each.

"I _said_ it was creepy to watch without me," Tony reminded him, and then he kicked up his feet on the theater chair, shooting for cavalier and mostly managing it. "Another dirty martini for me!" Dummy headed off in the direction of the bar. "And roll it."

They watched in silence. Howard's times in the 50s had mostly been about taking the wartime leaps in aviation technology into the private sector, propulsion, aerodynamics, and weaponry. The 60s, pure 'Nam, and the 70s... Tony knew now that the seventies were when Howard had started to look toward the future - limitless energy courtesy of the arc reactor, and his legacy: Tony. But Tony never saw a scrap of the man Steve said was in there, no loose smiles, no jokes, no flirting with women. His marriage to Tony's mom hadn't been completely loveless, as far as Tony could tell, but it hadn't been some great passionate love affair either. They were married for over fifteen years and Tony didn't have any siblings running around.

The biopic ended where they all ended - car crash, no survivors, Tony an orphan. Tony watched every second of it, face impassive.

The lights slowly came back up, Tony's dirty martini remained untouched after Dummy had brought it. A glance at Steve said the man had been crying. Tony pretended not to notice.

"The... expedition, the Arctic one that found me..." Steve was turned away, jaw clenched.

"Yeah," Tony wasn't quite certain what to say, or even what he was answering. "Well that's one huge budgetary line-item I can have Pepper scratch off. You think?"

"Stark Industries funded it." Steve's tone was half question, half statement, and Tony chose not to answer it. "That Howard..." Steve stopped. Tony watched the way he worked his jaw, almost chewing over the words again. " _Your_ Howard was a hero. Everything he did he did it because he believed in making the future happen today, and to save lives. And he was... _fun_ when big things weren't on the line. You're just like him, and that's a compliment, Tony. That's the guy you should remember, not the guy in the newsreels."

"What changed?" He asked it because it was the question that had been on his mind since the second Steve said their Howards weren't anything alike.

Steve shrugged. "The War, I guess. It changed a lot of guys. Changed me." And then he left the theater.

Tony watched the guy leave, saw the hunch of his back, at odds with 'Cap' the guy who was always standing tall, always ready for anything. Steve wasn't _defeated_ , but he sure didn't seem like the ice cream and apple pie guy that Tony had slowly been getting to know. On his more cynical days, Tony had figured Steve Rogers was a bit of an airhead, all muscle and no flourish, but more and more it seemed like Steve liked his cars American and his problems a little more black-and-white than grey-on-grey. It wasn't that Steve was _dumb_ , he just liked things a little less complicated. The twenty-first century wasn't great for that. All that meant was that Steve was shit when it came to lying.

"The War my ass." Tony wasn't an idiot, he knew first hand the things that changed the second you really went to war, the second you were strapped down and nearly tortured to death so you'd give them what they wanted. "J.A.R.V.I.S., roll it back to where we last paused."

J.A.R.V.I.S. complied immediately, bringing up the scene from the fall of Hydra. He had J.A.R.V.I.S. wind it back, watched it over again. He watched the General walk up to Howard, say something in his ear, and yeah, Howard's face changed. Tony could see it now that he knew what he was looking for.

"When was this taken?"

" _Howard Stark: The Creation of a Legend_ was released in..."

"No when was the archival footage taken?" Tony snapped. He never snapped... not at J.A.R.V.I.S., but he already knew when it was. Steve had made it far too obvious. "Was it the same day Captain America was declared Missing In Action?"

"Yes, sir."

Tony watched the footage a few more times, enough that even if there hadn't been a change, Tony had long since convinced himself that it was there.

"Can't imagine what you felt, Dad." Howard didn't answer - of course, but Tony nodded at the screen anyway. "Don't ever want to."

Tony got up from the uncomfortable chairs of the theater and patted one of the seats. Dad wasn't really sentimental, at least not that Tony knew, but he knew Howard had loved this stupid theater. He'd bought the damn thing - some crummy one in Brooklyn that had been slated for tear down sometime in the sixties - and he'd had it installed in the house in Long Island, and then Tony had had the whole thing packed up when he moved to Malibu. It was only right that it eventually found its way here. At least Steve could enjoy it.

"J.A.R.V.I.S., what did Cap ask for that got him Howard's flick?"

"Captain Rogers requested: film featuring Peggy Carter [Historical Figure]."

Tony almost smirked, Steve was apparently pretty damn sentimental. "Go find me a S.H.I.E.L.D. minion, send them to the archives in Malibu to pull up all that old war reel, get it digitized and do facial recognition, send him some more Peggy Carter." He went the rest of the way down the stairs, waited at the door for a moment. "If he asks, tell him it's a delayed response to his query."

He continued his walk down the halls, enjoying the bright and shiny modernity compared to the historical atmosphere for the last hour.

"And get me the stuff with Howard on it, old stuff." Tony went down the hall and into one of the elevators to go up to the penthouse lounge-slash-lab that Tony now called home. "Let's take a look at that guy we _don't_ remember from the newsreels, Dad."


End file.
